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It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age' the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.

Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone de Beauvoir
Age: 78 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 9
Died: 1986
Died: April 14
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Political Philosopher
Paris
France
Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Castor
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Also
Longer
Human
Either
Humans
Child
Behaving
Children
Age
Families
Men
Chance
Extraordinary
Like
Lying
Mere
Speak
Lies
Makes
Beings

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, I don't want to be just another blade of grass.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I don't want to be just another blade of grass.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
Simone de Beauvoir
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from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.
Simone de Beauvoir
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A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise. (p. 248)
Simone de Beauvoir
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Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, Ah, that's no longer feminist, is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.
Simone de Beauvoir
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There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.
Simone de Beauvoir